Author, blogger, parent

Why doesn’t Whole Foods want me to eat their pizza?

When the Whole Foods opened up in Hyde Park, we were naturally a bit excited. We’re not every day Whole Foods shoppers, but there are a few things that are more convenient to get there than anywhere else.

At first there were some hiccups: mistakes ringing things up, having to remind cashiers about the “case discount” every single time, cashiers not knowing things like which kind of bread you were buying.

Now that the store has been open for almost a year, I can report that…absolutely nothing has changed. Whatever opening day hiccups were there, are still there in full force.

One particularly humorous aspect to this is our repeated (failed) attempts to order multi-grain crust pizza. If you’ve never had Whole Foods pizza, it’s actually pretty decent. It’s roughly on par with anywhere else we might order pizza from, and cheaper too! Especially on Wednesdays, when they’re discounted, which just happens to be the day the kids have activities until late. A match made in heaven! I would really, really like to recommend it to you, but….

We vastly prefer the multi-grain crust, and they vastly prefer, I don’t know, not to sell it to us I guess? Every time we call, we get a different excuse. It’s become something of a game between Sara and I.

“We just sold our last one” is a popular excuse, second only to “we can’t make it, it takes too long to thaw”. “How long does it take to thaw?” we asked once. “Two hours.” Next time we called two hours in advance. “Oh, it takes three hours to thaw.” Nowadays we call about 5 hours in advance. “We just sold our last one,” said the guy on the phone. “It’s before noon!” Sara said in exasperation. “Maybe you should get more than one!” “Yeah, well, it’s really not that popular…” “How could you even know that if you only make one a day, and it sells out before noon?!”

Multiple times we’ve gotten, “Multi-grain crust? We don’t sell that. That’s not a thing.” My all time favorite was, “There’s no way you can order that, our ovens here can’t even cook it. It wouldn’t even work.” This despite the fact that we have gotten it there many times AND it’s on the paper menus sitting at the counter.

The funny thing is that about 50% of the time we are able to convince them to make it for us. “It’s in the freezer. You need to thaw it first,” we tell the person whose job it is to know how the pizzas work. “It takes about 3 hours, which is why we are calling now.” “Oh, okay,” they say, and sure enough, that week we get multi-grain. …Until the next week when it’s, “Oh, no, we don’t carry multi-grain at this store, you must have gotten it at a different store.”

We’ve personally spoke to the distributer about getting more mult-grain crusts ordered. “You should fill out a comment card,” one guy at the counter told us. “That’s the only thing they listen to.” Well, we’ve filled a few of them out too, and it hasn’t made a difference.

This past week we got, “You know, for some reason the delivery never came this week, so we don’t have any.” “That’s a new one, right?” I giddily texted Sara. “Better add that to the list.” “You know what?” sighed Sara. “Call them back and cancel the order.” “For real?” I said, but she was for real. I guess she finally hit her limit.

By my calculations, we have called to order pizza somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 times. That’s 20 times of having this ridiculous conversation. Why should I have to work this hard to convince somebody to sell me their product? What am I missing here, why don’t they want to make this pizza? Is it really that much harder to make than the regular pizza? We’re talking about Whole Foods here…shouldn’t they be into multi-grain crust?

I don’t know, man, and I guess we’ll never find out, because I think we’ve finally thrown in the towel. Another unsolved mystery for the files…